Download e-book for iPad: American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army by Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson's pathbreaking essay An American Utopia notably questions common leftist notions of what constitutes an emancipated society. recommended right here are—among different things—universal conscription, the entire acknowledgment of envy and resentment as a primary problem to any communist society, and the attractiveness that the department among paintings and relaxation can't be overcome.

To create a brand new global, we needs to first switch the best way we envision the realm. Jameson's textual content is preferably put to set off a debate at the possible choices to international capitalism. as well as Jameson's essay, the amount contains responses from philosophers and political and cultural analysts, in addition to an epilogue from Jameson himself.

Many might be appalled at what they're going to come across in those pages—there could be blood! yet maybe one has to spill such (ideological) blood to provide the Left a chance.

Written in the course of the wintry weather of 1857-8, the "Grundrisse" used to be thought of by means of Marx to be the 1st clinical elaboration of communist thought. a set of 7 notebooks on capital and funds, it either develops the arguments defined within the Communist Manifesto (1848) and explores the topics and theses that have been to dominate his nice later paintings "Capital".

Do we locate possible choices to the failed radical initiatives of the twentieth-century? What are the prospective kinds of fight this day? How will we struggle again opposed to the distress of our crisis-ridden current? "Communization" is the spectre of the rapid fight to abolish capitalism and the country, which haunts Europe, Southern California, and at any place the true abstractions of price that form our lives are contested.

It is a paintings of historic severe exegesis. It goals to set up the impact of the technological know-how of good judgment (SL) of G. W. F. Hegel at the Grundrisse of Karl Marx. it's the first paintings within the background of Marx stories to illustrate that the Hegelian common sense guided Marx's doctrinal improvement, and that the ordering of the logical different types within the SL is mirrored within the ordering of financial different types within the Grundrisse.

It used to be right here that Lenin justified his own interpretation of Marxism, savaged his competitors and set out his trenchant perspectives on classification clash, the teachings of prior revolutions, the dismantling of the bourgeois country and the substitute of capitalism by way of the, dictatorship of the proletariat.

Additional resources for American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army

Sample text

It is the identity of difference, foretold by Hegel’s Logic and replayed in all its possible combinations by Derrida’s tireless mental exercises, whose only flaw was the omission of prophecy—for standardization was something that deserved to be prophesied historically and then reconfirmed, après coup, as a prophecy which came true. We will call it space, and thereby complete the diagnosis of the supersession of time by space in a description of postmodernity which was also meant to be a historical and political diagnosis.

But the privatization of the hospitals and the institutionalization of the private practitioner bid fair to strip away that aura, and the doctors have for the most part had to bow to the economic power of insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants, while their guilds—such as the American Medical Association, which functioned in the past as a powerful anti-political lobby on the order of the National Rifle Association—are seemingly no longer very effective. Yet a society organized around health standards and the production of accessible drugs and foods is certainly conceivable: far more than a utopia of lawyers (Callenbach liked to insist on the beneficial litigiousness of his Ecotopia), it would necessarily presuppose the standard elite of philosopher-kings, given the highly specialized knowledge its decisions would seem to presuppose.

We must, however, draw the opposite conclusion from his, and as a consequence abandon government altogether. In fact, no one wants a state any longer, failed or not; all the factions are united in denouncing it. But as the state is the privileged subject matter of political theory, we must abandon political theory as well. I return therefore to the proposition that it is population which is both the conceptual and the social scandal: that philosophically fearful thing called the “Other” which has haunted modern thought in recent years is in reality plural, and it is population as such that constitutes otherness.